Ideas need to add up before they can multiply

December 30, 2011

When I was in chorus in elementary school I had this great teacher (that NO ONE appreciated). She didn't just babysit - she taught.

Being an alto, I was pretty bad at the high notes. Aside from surely sounding horrible, she realized that I was trying hard, stretching as far as possible, but I couldn't get my low voice to go any higher. After class one day she asked me to try something. She said, "Don't stretch to reach the high notes. Approach them from above. Reach down and grab them."

As abstract and non-specific as that advice sounds, it really helped me. Suddenly I could see how to could get to my destination. Visualizing it caused a funny thing happend, my body did what it needed to do and it worked! She had changed my mindset from thinking something was just out of reach to thinking that it was possible if approached the right way.

As you may have guessed, this isn't just about singing.

2011 was my busiest year ever. There were many times when my "to do" list felt just as out of reach as those high notes, but I got through them all and she's the person to thank for that.

When my list got too overwhelming, instead of thinking of all the things I needed to do all at once and stretching to get it all done, I thought of my "to do's" as though they were in a bucket with the most pressing things on top. As I finished one thing I would reach down and pull out the next thing.

What happened was that my stress level went way down. It became easier to prioritize what really needed to be done and by when (as opposed to layering on manufactured levels of urgency). It also became easier to see what I needed to do myself versus what could be done by other people.

This even worked with interuptions. When something tried to slam its way in, it would have to earn its way first into the bucket and then to the top. It wasn't allowed to stay just because it cut in.

October 06, 2011

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

“That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

October 04, 2011

Yesterday on the Scholarly Kitchen, the bloggers were asked: What do you think is the most important trend affecting publishing today? Here's my unabridged answer. However, I strongly recommend reading all the "chefs" replies.

The empowerment of the user. Never before have users (readers, consumers, researchers, clinicians...) had the voice they have today. Never before have publishers had the tools they have today to hear and interpret that voice. The impact is broad, exciting, and challenging.

Publishing has historically been accustomed to dictating what the reader is able to consume. However, over the past decade several trends (technological, sociological, and behavioral) have come together to give the reader, the user, many content options. We can argue another time whether or not the user makes the right decisions with those options, but we must acknowledge that they are making decisions.

We also need to acknowledge that this is more than simply the abundance of published material. It's the abundance of the channels through which they discover it, the ways in which they can consume and share it, and their options to interact with it. They no longer have to be passive recipients. They can be (and are!) active participants, not just in content creation but also in directly and indirectly shaping modes of consumption.

Suddenly publishers have found themselves needing to attract and keep user attention. They can not only be purveyors of content. They must also be experts in user experience, experts in content discovery techniques, and adept and agile experimenters.

What have been some of the results so far?

Publishers are still focused on content creation but they are getting far more creative in considering how their audience might consume that content. They are thinking about customization and personalization beyond the first notions of simply giving the user a few levers they can adjust (e.g., broad subject categories of interest, job title or level, etc.). They're realizing they cannot possibly anticipate the myriad of combinations of content that a user may deem as relevant and that it isn't cost-effective to even try. Instead, they need to enrich their content, dynamically create compilations, and give the user the keys so that they can adjust the compilation to fit their needs.

Historically, publishers have created and distributed content in silos. They are now coming face-to-face with the power of interoperability and exploring how they can break down those silos, at least from the user perspective. Some are adding external sources of content, breaking down the silos between organizations.

Everyone is talking about the importance of data, not just metadata to enrich content discoverability and interoperability, but data about users. Who are our users and what are they doing? When we experiment, what is the user reaction? How can we adjust based on that reaction? Data is becoming analytics.

Even more exciting, as publishers understand the user better, they will have the opportunity to understand the content better. Does the life of content begin or end at publication? In the scholarly realm, does the "research article" exist in isolation or as part of the broader context of discovery? How does it fit into that broader context? What stories does it tell? How can publishers help tell that story?